US and Singapore-based personalised messaging software startup Aampe on Tuesday said that it raised $1.8 million (about Rs 13.2 crore) in funding led by Sequoia Capital India's Surge.

Founded in July 2020, Aampe uses machine learning to personalise messages and communication for customers, helping businesses drive better customer retention and growth.

Aampe has acquired customers across Asia, including India, Singapore, Myanmar, and Indonesia.

Aiming for seamless integration, Aampe’s APIs and reinforcement learning pipelines and models can be easily plugged into messaging and communication providers that companies already use. This allows product managers, data scientists, and growth marketers to avoid expensive and time-intensive engineering projects. 

The funding from Sequoia Capital India's Surge will further accelerate Aampe's growth momentum and product development to serve global customers, a statement said.

“As a data scientist, I’ve struggled repeatedly across multiple companies with the quality of tools for user messaging. Naive automation has been prioritised over reliable inference and quality data generation. We’re building Aampe to make first-class data science serve one of the most important responsibilities of any business: speaking and listening to customers,” said Paul Meinshausen, Co-Founder of Aampe. 

“Most companies believe they’re sitting on massive stores of incredibly valuable data. While this is true to some extent, the usefulness of data also degrades quickly — and many companies underestimate the importance of continuously generating new and high-quality data. Aampe’s APIs do this and feed that data back into product development at both strategic and tactical levels,” he added.

Aampe is co-founded by Paul Meinshausen, who previously co-founded the fintech company PaySense, which was acquired by PayU in 2019; Sami Abboud, a software developer and data scientist who earned his PhD in Neuroscience from the Sorbonne in Paris; and Schaun Wheeler, an experienced data science leader who co-developed an award-winning Consumer Graph product at top US marketing and adtech company, Valassis.

(Disclaimer: Additional background information has been added to this PTI copy for context)